Government Releases More Declassified Flying Saucer Docs

Last week we got a first taste of some declassified documents related to a 1950s Air Force effort to build a flying saucer. Now, the National Declassification Center is releasing the whole trove of documents about the project. Read them here.

Check below for highlights PM found while reviewing these docs. We'll keep adding.

The staff at the National Declassification Center in College Park, Md., knew they found something interesting when they cracked open a cardboard box and saw cutaway schematics of flying saucers printed on the pages. The pages describe an Air Force flying saucer program that started in the mid-1950s and ended in 1961. In the upper right hand of each page was the icon of a flying disc stamped over a red arrow, the insignia of Project 1794.

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Last week, the NDC staff released a summary report from the project, dated 1956, and the global media went into a frenzy. The documents related to a flying saucer program by a Canadian firm, Avro Aircraft, that the U.S. military funded. Back then, the Air Force wanted a supersonic fighter while the Army wanted a flying jeep. In the end, after $10 million, the saucer was nothing more than a glorified, 18-ft-diameter hovercraft that lost control and stability after it rose above its 5 foot cushion of air. (It's never a good idea to build an aircraft with an aerodynamic center far from its center of gravity.)

"These records have been classified probably since their creation during the '50s," says Neil Carmichael, director of the declassification review division at NDC. "It's like somebody went into somebody's office, emptied out a filing cabinet, stuck it in a box, sealed it, and sent it off to the federal records center. It was deemed permanently valuable at some point in its life and that's why we have it today."

In truth, the Air Force's effort to create a flying saucer has not been a secret for years now. The result of the program—a hovercraft named the Avrocar—is on display at the U.S. Air Force Museum in Ohio. Like any good government program, the scientists produced designs of aircraft sporting creepy names like Silverbug, Weapon System 606A, VZ-9, and Project Y2—and information about them has been available under these monikers. But since this "dark" program operated in secrecy, many documents surrounding the saucer project are just now reaching the light of day.

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In 2001, U.S. Air Force personnel vetted the Project 1794 cache and found the information viable for public release. But it took more than a decade for the NDC staff to crack open the boxes and glimpse the saucer secrets within. "During the Cold War, in the 1950s and 1960s, the Army, Air Force, and Navy were experimenting with all sorts of weapons and flying platforms," Carmichael says. "And I think some of the odder stuff is going to come out that, maybe people knew about, but the records are just going to tell the rest of the story."

Nobody went looking for details about Project 1794. The government is nearing the end of a laborious process, started by the administration of Bill Clinton and codified by executive orders from the Bush and Obama administrations, of declassifying nearly 2 billion pages of government documents, some of which date to World War II. Of the millions of pages, three percent are considered permanent. And of that, less than one percent are classified, Carmichael says.

"We are now on our final four hundred million [pages]," Carmichael says. "There are all these wonderful little tidbits in these records that nobody really knew about."

We at PM encourage readers to look for themselves: we'll do the same and post our highlights as we go through the documents:

Highlights:

Security Warning: To fully appreciate these documents, consider their era. Possessing these documents without authorization would violate the national security laws of two nations: Canada (where it was built) and the United States (who footed the bill). Back then there was a possible saucer gap, and the Cold War solidified the American posture of secrecy that started in World War II. There are tens of millions of classified documents still out there that could be released.

Page 5: The flying saucer cutaway, with labels. The craft lifted via a large central fan called a turborotor. Exhaust was routed to the periphery of the vehicle and expelled through exhaust nozzles. The pilot controlled the flight with a single conventional "stick," but it was not connected to any mechanics. The pilot controlled the air pressure, which resulted in the movement of control cables at the turborotor.

Page 14: The irony of the flying saucer program is that the researchers actually invented a hovercraft. The craft took advantage of ground effect—where the air interaction with the ground increases pressure on the lower part of a wing, and hence increases lift. Had the military's ambitions ended there, they could have gotten a jump start on building a hovercraft. But the U.S. military wanted fast interceptors and high-flying jeeps, so the chance was lost. Then again, even today ground effect vehicles remain recreational oddities.

Page 23: The best and oddest photo in these documents shows half of a saucer in a hangar. The image might be fodder for conspiracy theorists and UFOlogists everywhere, but remember that no large-scale flight tests of the saucer were conducted, and the 18-ft-diameter aircraft that the military tested never rose more than a few feet off the ground. This was more of a flightless saucer.

Page 53: "The rate model did not show dynamic stability but could easily be controlled with the additional pitch damping provided by the jets." This kind of language shows us that potential problems with the design—chiefly its instability—were ignored. The report's confidence that jet engines and other mechanisms could stabilize the saucer proved ill-founded. Everything the engineers tried (even adding a tail) did not make this saucer fly right, and in 1961 the program was scrapped.

Page 72: "Thrust Recovery Tests." This series of cool photos shows the kind of methodology that marked the era, and this project. Various nozzles and hardware were needed to control the flow of exhaust from ports that ringed the saucer. The test beds show that the Avro engineers were serious people looking into what turned out to be a technological dead end.